Paying for web traffic does not always produce the best quality traffic. There are many scams on the internet whereby you pay upfront to get so-called “targeted web traffic” only to find that a robot visits your website, not real people, the specified number of times you paid for.

I don’t believe in paying for targeted web traffic when it is possible to get it for free, if you know how.

When most people think about free website traffic, they immediately think of the traffic that comes from organic search results in the major search engines and search engine optimization (SEO).

Most people think of search engine optimization (SEO) as a way of getting free traffic to their website. Whilst this can work really well if you are lucky enough to get a number one listing, SEO does not produce quick results. In fact it can take many months before you will see any significant levels of traffic to make it worthwhile.

Admittedly, SEO professionals may be able to speed up the results, but then you will be paying a pretty penny for their services on an ongoing basis, especially if you are in a very competitive market.

In order to increase targeted internet traffic it is important to understand where you can get free web traffic from. The best sources of targeted web traffic are those that are being used successfully by online business owners and therefore are proven to work.

So what is the best way of getting cheap website traffic?

Let’s take a look at all of the traffic techniques that are working today. People are using these techniques very successfully to drive targeted traffic to their websites and they are a good starting point for you. It makes no difference whether you have a brand new website, or you are looking at increasing internet traffic to an established website.

By following proven traffic methods, you will become more successful at getting free website traffic. I suggest you pick one of these techniques to implement on your website then get it working for you before moving onto the next one.

Don’t just rely on one website traffic technique, even if it is working great for you at the moment, because if that traffic source suddenly disappears, so will your business!

Here are the cheap website traffic techniques:

Organic Local Search Listings: this method gets your business website onto page one of search engines such as Google. People looking for a local business to buy from will find your business more easily. Local searches are keyword phrases that contain a town, city, region or state name. The competition for these is a lot lower and much easier to get ranked for.

PPC: pay per click advertising. PPC is not necessarily a cheap way to increase targeted website traffic. However when used correctly there is still some cheap website traffic to be had from this method if you follow some basic rules.

Video: online video viewing is increasing month after month. It has become a lot easier to create high quality videos cheaply and to get them posted on major video sharing sites for little to no cost.

Twitter, Facebook and other social networking sites: social media sites can produce a lot of targeted website traffic as long as you provide good quality content that answers a need your readers have. Don’t try to post sales messages to social networking sites despite what the latest internet marketing gurus tell you.

Article Directories: article directories such as EzineArticles.com can get you additional visibility which can lead to you being perceived as an expert in your field. This can lead to more traffic and can build trust with your potential customers. Search engines such as Google will also be more trusting of links from good quality article directories which in turn can help your page rankings.

Podcasts: a podcast is an audio recording. Consider recording your content in high quality and posting it onto free podcasting sites. It is easy to create a recording using software that already exists on your computer. The best place to get it listed is the Apple iTunes site.

Forums: these can be a good place to raise your profile. Become a registered member of the most appropriate and relevant forums you can find. Get involved in conversations and make yourself a useful and helpful person. Over time you will attract people to your website who will be very targeted to your topic.

Affiliate Programs: you may not have thought about using an affiliate program as a way of generating traffic. Offering a share of your profits to affiliate marketers is a good way to increase internet traffic from multiple sources.

Joint Ventures: finding someone in your industry who has an emailing list of their own can be another way of driving traffic. Make sure your content is of relevance to the joint venture partner and that it would be something that your partner’s customers would be interested in.

External Links: these are backlinks from websites that point to yours. Depending on the popularity and location of the link you could get significant amounts of traffic that lasts a long time.

Offline Marketing: making use of offline marketing channels such as seminars, conferences, and networking with like-minded people, can still be effective because people are social creatures at heart, hence the reason social networking websites do so well. Make sure your call to action is to drive people to your website.

Blogging: posting regularly to a blog is a very effective way to increase website traffic. When combined with social media sites and RSS feeds you can build a superb traffic generator. This is the main technique I use very successfully.

Organic Search Listings: organic listings are the free listings on the search engine results pages. You use SEO techniques to get your website listed, hopefully on page one of the search engines. Don’t start here if your website is brand new, or you are targeting a very competitive keyword.

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Let’s face it, you need to get traffic to your website or you will never make a dime from it. The only problem is that most new marketers have no idea how to get cheap website traffic and they also don’t have a very large budget. This can make it a bit difficult to get the traffic you need, but not impossible. The bum marketing method is a great way to get not just cheap, but free website traffic. Read on to discover the bum marketing method.

Bum Marketing was created by Travis Sago and is a way that people are making lots of money without spending a single dime. The bum method includes writing article for traffic and turning that traffic into sales. The basic ideas behind bum marketing is to write your articles around a specific keyword phrase so that you can get listed on the search engines. Then, you will get traffic from the search engines and be able to create small traffic machines.

The keyword phrase you target needs to be one that people are using to search and needs to have little competition. This gives you the best chance to get listed on Google and other search engines. The advantage of this is that if you had a large amount of articles out there you could be getting a large amount of cheap website traffic. Cheap meaning that all the traffic costs you is some of your time to write the articles with the bum method.

Imagine if you wrote just one article each day for a year. You would have 365 little traffic machines creating a flood of traffic to your websites. Even if you only got 1 visitor a week from each article you would be getting 365 visits a week. If you convert one out of every 50 into a sale, then you would get about one sale each day. If each sale made you a $30 commission, then you would have created a lasting $210 income each week. Now imagine if you wrote 5 articles a day.

How can you get cheap website traffic? There are a few easy ways to achieve this. One of the ways is ordering a few hundred articles from any freelance website. Once you have these written for you, you can either submit them to article directories or place them onto your own website. There are a few issues with this method. First of all, it may be hard to find a good and reliable writer who will create exciting, or even human readable articles.

Thus, you may have to spend time and money until you finally find someone who does their job well. Secondly, it will take time for the web search engines to index your articles. Thirdly, the articles that you place into an article directory will typically hold good Google positions only for a short time. Within weeks, they will start to decline, bringing you less and less traffic.

The other option is PPC (Pay per Click). You can bid on the cheapest keywords and get some cheap website traffic this way. The problem is that if you bid on the cheapest keywords, you will appear at the very bottom of the advertiser’s list, and your ad may not be noticed. Again, time and money spent, and not much result achieved.

One good way to get cheap traffic (it’s actually free) is by creating several potential viral videos and placing them onto YouTube, each having a strategic title. If you have not yet tried this method, you may want to consider it. It’s free, and if the video becomes popular, it will bring you more visitors as time goes by. There are some nice guides that can teach you how to generate traffic with a simple little video placed on a popular website.

There are hundreds of different ways to get website traffic, and targeted visitors to generate leads for any business. What needs to be accomplished is getting the largest amount of targeted traffic to your website and most importantly cheap website traffic.

In this article we will cover a couple different ways to generate cheap website traffic as well as how to create targeted leads from that traffic.

Honestly, what you want to ask yourself first is, what do you want to take place when the y get to your website? Do you want to redirect them to another page? Do you want them to purchase a product, or do you want to collect some contact information? When planning out your website be sure to think about these questions and plan out your user experience.

The first strategy in getting cheap website traffic is to create a short report or eBook and submit it to a couple of different directories. Make sure to put the hyper link or URL of your website either in the body or at the end of the report, then submit it to directories like free-ebooks.net, scribd, docstoc and yudu.com. Make sure that you use the keywords that represent your product, service or website in the title and the keyword area of your entry. The key here is to create interest so make sure that you create a quality report delivering value. If people see that you are giving good information away for free they are more than likely to click through to your website.

Now let’s say that your website has more than one category, as most do. We’ll use excel training as an example. Because there are different versions of excel like Excel for Windows XP and Windows Vista, if you are writing content and submitting it to directories, make sure that you are linking directly to the page within your website that pertains to that keyword and not the main domain of your website. This is a real effective way to get cheap web traffic as they will land on the page that directly pertains to their interest.

The next strategy for getting cheap website traffic is actually renting email lists from companies that have a large database of double opt in leads. These are usually very targeted and can be a little spendy to get started with. I know this is counterintuitive to the cheap website traffic approach but in the long run, this method will generate targeted leads for very cheap compared to hiring a SEO company or running Pay Per click especially if you don’t know what your doing in that arena.

Now, how to turn those visitors into leads. Make sure that you are directing them to the specific page on your website that pertains to their interests and give them an offer they can’t refuse in exchange for their contact information. The contact information can be anything from just an email address to their name email address, phone number, address, income level etc. With that said that less that you ask for in the process the better conversions you will get.

If you think about your lead generation process and planning it out you most surely be able to generate cheap website traffic.

Let’s make this clear: cheap website traffic does not mean free website traffic, and in this article I will concern myself with getting cheap website traffic using Google AdWords. Anything dealing with the notion of free web site traffic falls outside the purview of this article.

Google AdWords and Cheap Website Traffic

The first thing in the process is to understand how much we pay for Google AdWords keywords?

Actually, the amount we pay for Google AdWords keywords is never the amount that we placed our bid for. We almost always end up paying less than what we bade for.

Why?

Actually, you only pay 1 percent more than what person below you have bid for the keyword, not the maximum amount you bid for. In this regard, Google AdWords keywords auction work more or less like an e-bay auction.

The second thing that matters in the rate is click through rate (CTR). As the matter of fact, this plays a more important role in deciding if you will get the keyword or not than the amount you wrote in bid. The more relevant your website is for the searchers of that particular keyword the lesser money you will pay for the keywords.

In many situations, just an increase of 1% in CTR means a drop in as much as 50% in the price you pay for the keyword. Hence, if you want cheap website traffic from Google AdWords then it is important for you to increase the click through rate and make you content and website as tightly focused around the keyword as possible.

The third thing in the process is to measure what works and what doesn’t. Keep shuffling the ad copy until you perfect your system, and reuse the things that work. The higher your click through rate will go the cheaper your web traffic will become. Eventually, it may reach a level that you consider is as free web site traffic

Your high click through rate will also push your ads upward for the chosen keywords because for Google, this is not just about your cheap website traffic for you, but it is about real money.

Getting cheap website traffic to your website is actually fairly simple. We are going to cover three sources for getting cheap website traffic that does not involve any SEO or depending on the search engines at all for that matter.

Forums

Do a search on one of the top search engines for your keyword and add “forum” to the end of your query or search. A good tool for searching for forums is BoardTracker.com and you can find sources for cheap website traffic very quickly. Type in your keyword in the search bar and it will aggregate thousands of different results for forums relating to your keyword. Look through the forum and make sure that it is not dormant. This doesn’t work all the time but you take a look at the bottom of most forums and see how many active members it has. You can also see how recently there have been posts made. Make sure that it has had activity within the last week or so.

Once you determine this is an active forum join the forum. Make sure that you do not, ever, ever, ever, spam the forums. Depending on the rules of the forum you should be able to create a signature line in your profile. Some forums require that you make a number of posts before being able to create a signature line. The signature line can be a link that leads back to your website. Take the time and get involved in the community. Answer questions and ask questions, the more you leave your signature line the more cheap website traffic you will get to your website.

Blog comments

Blog commenting is very similar to forum marketing and can generate targeted cheap website traffic. The key here is to be one of the first ones to make a comment on a high traffic blog that gets a lot of comments. Setting up a Google alerts for your keywords and using the as it happens feature will assure you that you will be notified when a new blog has been posted and leaving a blog comment and leaving your website address in the appropriate area will bring in cheap website traffic. A real cool free software that will notify you when a new blog has been posted is comment sniper.

Once again, do not spam the blogs. Take the time to read the blog post and leave a valuable comment that is relevant to the subject matter, and then leave the website address to your website. Here is a tip when linking to your website from blog commenting. Deep link into your site to a page that is relevant to the blog post. Make sure to enter the full extension URL. This will make sure that the cheap website traffic that comes to your site is still targeted website traffic.

Yahoo answers

Yahoo answers is real a good place to get cheap website traffic because it is where people are blatantly asking questions that you can answer for them and get cheap website traffic by directing them to your website. And again, don’t spam yahoo answers. Create a profile and read their terms of service and make sure to abide by them. It is probably a good idea to link from Yahoo answers to an internal page on your site that relates to that specific question.

Implementing these strategies can be somewhat time consuming but will generate cheap website traffic.